Which Japanese poet reshaped haiku while walking the northern provinces on foot?

Bashō, whose Narrow Road to the Deep North records a journey of some 2,400 kilometres in 1689, mostly on foot, at 45, in poor health, through provinces then considered wild. He gave away his house before leaving and did not expect to come back.

The book is not a diary. It mixes prose and verse, compresses and rearranges the journey, and includes scenes that his travelling companion's own account shows did not happen that way - it is a composed work using a real trip as its material. The form he was working in was not yet called haiku; he took the opening verse of a linked-verse sequence and made it stand alone, which is the origin of the whole genre.

The famous frog poem - old pond, frog jumps in, the sound of water - is often held up as the moment the form found itself: no allusion to classical poetry, no cleverness, just a plain event and the silence around it. Bashō also disliked being a teacher, complained about his students, and wrote near the end that his poems were like a fire made of ordinary sticks.